This invention relates to ice-making and more particularly to ice-makers for producing individual pieces of ice from water having a generally half-round shape. There have been machines for making individual pieces of ice for a number of years which either form the pieces individually or form them with some type of interconnections that are subsequently broken to provide individual pieces suitable for use in a beverage or the like. Although these pieces may have different shapes than that of a geometric cube, they are commonly referred to as ice cubes.
In most of these ice-makers, the evaporator has employed a coil of copper and has been relatively expensive to produce, and also the hot gas exiting from the refrigerant compressor has been employed to harvest the ice cubes after freezing has been completed. Such a harvesting operation has resulted in melting a substantial amount of the ice already frozen, thus reducing the output of the ice-maker and contributing to poor overall energy efficiency. Because of the added energy consciousness that has become prevalent throughout the world within the past few years, improvements in ice-makers to make them more efficient become particularly desirable.